Leslie Sussan
My father, Herbert Sussan, filmed the aftermath of the atomic bombings, only to see the footage buried as top secret for decades. He believed that the American people could only be mobilized to stop nuclear weapons if they fully understood their human meaning in living color. But the years embittered him. As a young person, I saw him as a hypocrite sitting on the wrong side of the generation gap because he did not embrace my activism and oppose the Vietnam War or support my interracial marriage. After he became ill with a cancer he attributed to his time in the atom-bombed cities, he began speaking out for the first time. His last wish was that his ashes be scattered at Ground Zero in Hiroshima. I went to Japan in 1987 with my little girl (then 4). I found myself, like my father, deeply drawn to Hiroshima and spent a year coming to know survivors who remembered being filmed by my father more than 40 years earlier. https://hiroshima-choosinglife.com/
